Well this past week the temperature approached 70, in March. Thank you, weather Gods.
This weekend, however, it did not. Me and the dog went hiking anyway. We tried to knock another item off the Broome County Dozen challenge and we were not 100% successful. This was entirely due to my navigation errors.
We arrived at 11am and parked at the Park office. I wandered around to try and find out if I needed to pay to park or if someone could point me in the direction of the trail head I wanted, or any trail head really. No luck.
Since the dog was screaming in the car to let me know I’d left him behind, I decided to collect him before a good Samaritan broke my window. We wandered together for a while and I used the AllTrails app to determine when I was pointed in the direction of the trail I was looking for. We got near it eventually and then finally got ON it.
I was congratulating myself pretty heartily at this point and the trail was a lovely winding thing around a beautiful half thawed pond. Chief was thrilled. We trekked along nicely for a while, hitting occasional icy spots, but the real trouble came when it was time to find the second loop of the trail. And didn’t. Instead we took another loop around a different pond. This one featured sections of trail so slick with ice and narrow that I had to do a sort of three handed crawl. The dog helped this by alternating between yanking on the leash and banging his head against my unsteady legs. I’m assuming he was trying to kill me and make it look like a tragic hiking accident.
After surviving the ice and finishing the second pond loop we got back on the trail, taking the far side this time, we got to the end of the pond without much incident.
Except that now I had no idea how to get back to my car. Thankfully Google helped me find a road and the parking lot I was looking for. There was probably a faster way, which I tried to find and failed. So we just walked an extra mile to finally get back to the car. And boy was that a beautiful site.
Though we didn’t technically do the Broome County Dozen hike, we did log about 6 miles so I’m going to call it done.
There were no signs or trail markers anywhere that I saw to help with navigation. The trails are easy to follow when you’re on them but where they go or what they’re called I still have no idea.
Me and the dog are whooped and spent a long time snuggling in the sunshine in our spare bedroom.
